While many conservatives are waking up and recognizing that the Iraq war is a complete fiasco, others like James Taranto are sticking to their guns. His latest post is both hilarious and bizarre. He starts things off with this whopper:
We’ve long been convinced that history will eventually come to regard George W. Bush as a near-great president, or possibly even a great one, chiefly for his bold foreign-policy vision.
This might be the dumbest comment I’ve read about Bush in months (other than most of the drivel coming from Fred Barnes). Bush’s “bold vision” has been exposed as pie-in-the-sky Wilsonian utopianism. Thinking you can turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy simply by toppling Saddam will go down as one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in American history. The two biggest beneficiaries of this strategy are Iraq and al Qaeda. Good grief.
Taranto, however, is just getting started. He follows that line up with this:
Call us Polyannaish, but although we are annoyed by the incessant drumbeat of defeatism over Iraq, we find it hard to get worried about it. Will it lead to another Vietnam–i.e., an ignominious withdrawal? It seems unlikely. It certainly won’t happen on President Bush’s watch. And who, faced with the responsibility of actually making the decision, would pull out of Iraq, leaving behind a potential base for terrorists who could one day attack America again?
The thing to keep in mind is that the people who complain about how terrible the war is, or who take the weaselly position that they’re for the war but it’s all gone wrong because the Bush administration is irredeemably “incompetent,” are doing so for reasons that have little to do with the actual war. Some have always opposed it on ideological grounds. Others are seeking partisan advantage. Still others–and many of our fellow pundits fall into this category–are simply succumbing to peer pressure. They feel as though they have to gang up on President Bush because that’s what all the cool kids inside the Beltway are doing right now. Perhaps one day they will be mature enough to make up their own minds about things.
Polls suggest that public opinion has of late turned decisively against the war. But it strikes us that these feelings do not run very deep, and indeed may be partly the result of the same sort of peer pressure.
The man is showing he’s completely blinded by partisanship. Are conservatives like George Will and William F. Buckley succumbing to peer pressure? Of course, Taranto doesn’t bother to address the countless examples of incompetence. He can’t. Instead he resorts to lame attempts at ridicule, not realizing that he’s the one that looks like a fool.
